


In the Interim

by tryptophan



Series: When They're not Saving the World [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Claire Temple - Mentioned, Foggy Nelson - Mentioned, Gen, Karen Page - Mentioned, Lonely Matt, Matt gaining direction in his life again, Stick - Mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 15:05:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6525097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryptophan/pseuds/tryptophan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Maybe you don’t see the point of what you’re doing now.  Maybe you’re right and it is all in vain. But you can’t know what will come of your work tomorrow, or the next day, or a year from now, or how God will use your work. Your friends, they’ve seen what you’ve seen, but they’re still fighting. So, maybe you need to figure out what you want your work’s legacy to be.”</p>
<p>In which we find out what Matt has been up to since the dissolution of his law firm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Interim

**Author's Note:**

> Occurs between chapters 5 and 6 of [The Red and the Black - Conversations Between Vigilantes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6456172/chapters/14775274).

Aside from that asshole, Stick, Matt Murdock was the only person whose opinion ever mattered to Elektra. More than that, Matt, and Matt alone, was the only person that made her truly care about someone besides herself, made her feel what she presumed all those other people referred to as “love.” So, when her “parents” passed away and left her with a considerable trust and inheritance, and her father’s lawyers asked her to whom she wished to leave her sizeable fortune, she spoke without hesitation. 

Foggy was working for the biggest shark in town. Karen was putting all her energy into researching stories, and truth be told, Matt was pretty much on the outs with her. She’d said, in so many words, that she needed off the crazy train that was Daredevil. Elektra was in the ground. Stick was… wherever Stick went when he was temporarily through fucking with Matt’s life. This left Matt with the tattered remains of his career, too much time, and, more money than he’d ever dreamed of having. So, he fell back on old routines. 

For a little while, he lived as he had with his father. He read, he played, he listened to some shows on Netflix, ate socially unacceptable suppers at socially unacceptable hours, and neglected to wear pants for days on end. He quickly grew bored of the idleness, though, and once he’d caught up on a month’s worth of sleep, allowed all his open wounds to heal, and spent several hours meditating, he felt like he could face the world again. 

His first social call was to Fr. Lantom. As was his way, he showed up to a random Mass and hung around after, waiting for the priest. 

“Matthew. Haven’t seen you in a while,” Fr. Lantom said by way of a greeting.

“Yeah. Um, well, my law firm imploded, my girlfriend left before anything really started, and an old friend died. I-- needed some time.”

Fr. Lantom crossed his arms across his chest, sizing up the man in front of him. Matthew Murdock certainly kept his life interesting. Most of his parishioners led quiet, normal lives, where work, kids, retirement, and the banal day-to-day minutiae of non-superheroes was sporadically interrupted by birth, death, marriage, divorce, taxes, and the like. He’d accrued decades of experience in ministering to such matters, and could often predict unspoken problems, which led to the general impression of him having some special insight into the human psyche. 

Not so with Matthew. Sure, Lantom was observant, and he could deduce many things about the man while sitting with him and talking to him, by what was said and unsaid, but he never knew what crisis Matthew would bring in on any given day. He briefly considered everything Matthew had just said. Aimless, he thought. This is the first time in his life that his day hasn’t been structured for him. He’s not a child, not under the care of nuns, not in school, not working a steady job. 

“And now that you’ve taken that time?” he said after a brief pause.

“I don’t know.” Matt idly twisted at his cane. “Awhile back, I spoke of a man who was hurting the city. And I stopped him. We, my partner and I, and our assistant, we stopped him. He went to prison. But he’s running the prison from within. He controls things in there, and he can control things out here, too. What if-- what if everything I do,” he paused, knowing his priest would understand he meant both his daytime and nighttime activities, “what if it’s all for nothing? What if it doesn’t matter?”

Lantom expelled a lungful of air and nodded. “Do you remember several months back, Eliot Grote’s funeral? Afterwards, you asked why you felt guilty?” Matt nodded. “I told you that perhaps your work wasn’t done.”

“You think there’s still something I need to do? To make things right?”

“Our work is never done, Matthew. ‘In the morning, sow your seed, in the evening let not your hand be idle.’ Somewhere from the end of Ecclesiastes,” he said, gesturing vaguely to indicate that that much citation should suffice. “I could recommend that you read the whole book; it’s not long. You may’ve read it already, even. Maybe you don’t see the point of what you’re doing now. Maybe you’re right and it is all in vain. But you can’t know what will come of your work tomorrow, or the next day, or a year from now, or how God will use your work. Your friends, they’ve seen what you’ve seen, but they’re still fighting. So, maybe you need to figure out what you want your work’s legacy to be.”

Matt left the church and went to a moderately busy restaurant to get lunch. It was never easier to be alone than in a large crowd, and he used that to great effect. While he ate, he thought back to the handful of people whom he’d loved, whose work had touched his life. 

There’d been his father, of course. Jack Murdock had made his living with his hands, using them to pummel opponents into submission and defend his own body. Jack had worked with his hands outside the ring, too, occasionally picking up day laborer jobs under the table when money was really tight. Despite being rough around the edges, he had only ever been kind and gentle towards his son. But Jack lived and died by how he used his hands, and went out in a blaze of glory that at least secured enough money to see Matt through to adulthood.

Then at the orphanage, there was Sister Maggie. When Jack always told Matt to get back up, Sr. Maggie taught him that sometimes the next move in the fight was to wait. She was loving and compassionate, yet firm and disciplined. Matt never knew his mother, but that was what he had hoped she would’ve been like.

Stick’s hands, his life, his work, were weapons, like Matt’s father’s. Unlike Jack, though, Stick was harsh and hard. He wanted to shape Matt into a weapon, and superficially failed.

Then there was Foggy, the best, closest, and truest friend he’d had in his entire life, who was now gone because Matt had pushed him away. Sure, he could pretend to himself that Foggy viewed him as an impediment, but he knew he’d failed Foggy badly in the Frank Castle case, and sometime soon he’d have to make the first move to repair that relationship. Foggy had worked his ass off to get to where he was. He came from a family just a little better off than Matt and his father had been. His parents had no expectations of graduate degrees or corner offices with expense accounts for their son; they’d just wanted him to continue in the family business or another reliable, respectable blue-collar profession. And yet, Foggy had proved his intelligence and built something great for himself, where he could have some worldly success and still help those who needed it. 

Elektra, Stick’s other weapon (protégé? Surrogate daughter?) had been aimless. Where Stick had failed with Matt, he’d succeeded with Elektra, but weapons need to be aimed, and Elektra had been aimless for most of the time he’d known her. She was impelled only by what amused her, with little consideration for others. 

For better or worse, Karen was relentless. She either didn’t know or didn’t care enough to stop when it was prudent to do so. The tenacity could be troublesome, yet he loved that in her, because regardless of how it would shake out, she was fighting the good fight. 

Claire was one of the true heroes of the city. She worked awful shifts doing things that required mental and physical fortitude, and still found it in herself to help people like him off the clock and off the books. She was intelligent, professional, and a New Yorker through and through. 

Wilson Fisk had taken all the potential for the good he could do for everyone and perverted it into good done only for himself. He claimed to want to help the city, and probably still believed, on some level, that he was helping the city, but he was shaping the city in his image, to please himself (were they so different, Matt wondered). What could’ve been great benevolence had been twisted into great selfishness.

Then there was the dark image of himself; not a boy who’d lost his parents, but a father who’d lost his children. Frank Castle. Frank fought himself, fought others, fought the world, fought God. The best of his life’s work had been cruelly taken from him one sunny afternoon, and since then the man had given into the darkness within him. 

Finally, there was Fr. Lantom. He’d seen evil. He never ceased trying to guide those who didn’t want to be guided, or those who strayed continually. He was intimately familiar with death, having worked in Rwanda (and let’s be honest, one of the rougher neighborhoods in New York), and yet still believed there was a point to each and every life, no matter how long or short or warped.

By the time Matt finished his lunch, he knew what his next step was. He might not know whether anything would come of it, or whether it ultimately mattered, but he tried to have faith that it would. He stepped out into the bright afternoon with the next part of his journey laid before him.

\---

The sum Elektra left to him made the cursed money from his father’s final win seem like pocket change. He could do all those things he’d proposed to Elektra; visit London, Paris, places with expensive wines and golden beaches, or whatever it was that rich people valued. He could move to pretty much any apartment in the city, become a shut-in and grow eccentric like William Randolph Hearst or Marlon Brando. And yet, he chose to continue his life as usual. He kept his one-bedroom loft in Hell’s Kitchen. He decided he would continue to practice law. He would continue to patrol at night. The only difference was that he broke the lease on the office space that had once housed the fledgling Nelson & Murdock. 

Getting a new sign made would’ve been trivial, and even though the Frank Castle case had been a debacle of the most epic proportions, no small portion of the blame laid on him, they’d still managed to build a bit of a reputation in the neighborhood. Still, though, it had been the home of Nelson and Murdock, and contained too many memories, eager young lawyers who’d just passed the bar; sitting with Karen after she’d been released from jail; meeting Mrs. Cardenas; rejoicing over Fisk’s downfall; prepping for the Castle trial; confessing his alter-ego to Karen. They all had made breaks for fresh starts, and he decided he should, too.

Before he shuttered it for good, several people had asked if he could help them with things that non-criminal people need lawyers for. This sort of legal gruntwork was below Foggy’s new pay grade, but Matt was willing to help. He agreed to help and to accept whatever payment they insisted on giving. To such people, it was a point of pride not to accept charity, and so he still ended up with fruit and chickens and strawberry-rhubarb pies. He just changed his venue.

Josie’s was centrally located and more than familiar to Matt’s clientele. And so, after negotiations (whatever legal help Josie needed, and at least one decent lunch a week), Matt hosted what was essentially a pro bono legal clinic in her bar on most afternoons, until too many people showed up for happy hour swill. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement; Josie got useful services, a lunch companion who didn’t make her feel like she was in a Eugene O’Neill play, and Matt got to continue helping people through the law, with more flexible hours for punching out criminals after the sun went down. 

His life quickly fell into an almost monastic routine. He woke, showered, ate, dressed, and headed to Josie’s to make himself available to the people of Hell’s Kitchen. He worked through the afternoon, leaving when it got too crowded, and then would go patrol once it was dark enough. After the mortification of the flesh, he’d sleep and do it all over again. 

The work was easy, if uninteresting. Most people, even in Hell’s Kitchen, didn’t need a defense attorney; they needed someone who could help them figure out wills or divorces or legal guardians for their children in case they really did end up needing a defense attorney or a will. He helped some of the new residents, young creative and entrepreneurial types, set up LLC’s. He gave himself a crash course in immigration law and helped some people straighten out their immigration status. 

On Friday evenings, he’d pack up his “practice” early and head a couple of blocks down to a local church that hosted a weekly meal advertised for “members of our community who are hungry.” There he helped prep, serve, and clean up. 

It was good work and satisfying work, and between the volunteers and the guests, it was an interesting cross section of humanity. There were many who were homeless: vets, a man with chronic migraines that prevented him from holding steady employment, some addicts, some who’d fallen into a cycle of poverty and couldn’t get back out in such an expensive city. There was a woman with multiple sclerosis living on disability that didn’t stretch far enough to cover balanced meals, and too many elderly people living on fixed incomes and who had next to no interpersonal interactions. On the volunteer side, there was a regular quartet of middle school-aged girls who were fulfilling community service requirements for their school, and were always bright and bubbly. There was a mother who brought her small daughter who mostly soaked up attention from lonely octogenarians. There was a hipster guy who always seemed a little stressed and fearful, as though something bad had happened to him, but he was trying his best to cope. There were a couple of other professional types, and one man who, as he said, was “paying it forward.” Matt chatted easily with anyone who talked to him, but as with his law practice, he moved through his life without letting anyone in. 

Near the end of the night, after all the leftover rolls had been sent with the guests who would accept them, Matt started folding up the chairs, so they could be put away. Malcolm, the hipster guy, came over to stack them for him.

“Hey Matt.”

“Hi Malcolm.”

“You’re a lawyer, right?”

“Not a very successful one,” he said with a self-deprecating grin. “Why, do you need some help?”

“No,” he responded. “Well, not me specifically. But, well, with all the superhero craziness that’s been going on, and all the vigilantes, the church here is starting a support group for people who’ve been affected by any of that. We’re calling it ‘Heroes and their Consequences.’ I’ve talked with some of the people who are planning on coming. There was a woman whose apartment was crushed by the Hulk during the Incident, well, the first Incident. There are a couple of people who say Captain America saved them. There is one guy who insists a British guy literally controlled his mind. There are some people who’ve been victims of white supremacist groups who claim that Thor’s presence vindicates them. Someone claims that a chatty guy in a blue and red suit swooped out of the air and saved her from a mugger. We’ve got a handful of people who have been affected, good and bad, by our own backyard hero, Daredevil. And then there are people who’ve either been protected by the new guy, the one they’re calling the Punisher, and people who’ve lost family members to his violence. I was just thinking that maybe your legal perspective might add an interesting dynamic to the group.”

Matt choked a little and swallowed hard. “That might be interesting.” He hoped it would go unnoticed that the smile he faked didn’t quite reach his eyes. “When is it? Is it here in the church basement?”

Malcolm confirmed the location and gave him the time. They finished stacking the last of the chairs and prepared to lock up. “Good to see you tonight,” he called. “Hope you can make the meeting.”

Matt made polite response, claiming he'd check his schedule and try to make the meeting. He waved goodbye and headed off. He was supposed to meet Frank Castle, another “hero” (he sincerely doubted Frank would consider himself a hero) whose consequences affected the community. He decided against the suit, though. Daredevil and his consequences could wait for another night.

**Author's Note:**

> Fr. Lantom quotes from Ecclesiastes 11:6. It is indeed near the end of the book.


End file.
